Google Has Produced More Unicorn Founders Than Anyone. That's the Wrong Number to Look At.
I wrote The Founder's Creed to help create 1,000 unicorns. So here's a fun fact: Google has produced more unicorn founders than any company on earth — 218 of them, but not the highest likelihood. Why does that matter?
OpenAI has produced 21, just 10% of the same total number as Google.
If you only looked at the first number, you'd back Google alumni every time. That's Observing — counting what's in front of you. But remember what Col. Boyd said about the OODA loop — the place most people go wrong is the Orientation phase.
Here's what Orienting properly reveals: an ex-Google employee is 2.9x more likely than baseline to found a unicorn than an average founder. An ex-OpenAI employee, however, is 14.7x more likely to create a unicorn. That's observing the exact same data, but orienting around a completely different signal. It comes down to asking the right question — this is hyper-critical when you are betting on a pair of founders; bottom line, it's easy to be overly impressed by a Google pedigree.
Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI with no product and no revenue. Safe Superintelligence is now valued at $32 billion — built almost entirely on team and conviction (belief, in the BOODA world). Dario and Daniela Amodei, Mira Murati, David Luan, Aravind Srinivas — the list of OpenAI alumni building unicorns keeps growing, and Murati is the standout woman among them in data where women remain sharply underrepresented at every stage.
The entire Orient phase of the BOODA Doctrine can be seen in one chart: don't just Observe the data — re-Orient around what it actually predicts, listen to what the data is telling you. That's how great investors pick winners — they listen to the signal from the market and let the PR, hype, and other noise fade away.
What's the “Google” in your world — the obvious, high-volume answer (the 2.9x likelihood) that everyone chases while the real 14.7x edge sits somewhere with a smaller, sharper signal that others might miss? I know where it is in the sports world... but I'm not telling.